Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy Auction House where we are continuing with our look into the history and the development of the Thompson submachine gun. And today we're going to be taking a look at Savage production guns and the 1928A1. So, to put ourselves in the proper
perspective: it is currently 1928. And there are a couple of major changes that are
going to be happening here for Auto Ordnance. One is that General John Thompson retires, steps
back from the business and is no longer involved. And his personal influence had
been a major impact on the company, so what he said kind of went. Well, with him gone, things
start to get a little bit looser. And right about the same time
Thomas Fortune Ryan dies. Now Thomas Ryan had been the financier
for Auto Ordnance right from the beginning. You know, it's not cheap to contract
Colt to make you 15,000 very nice guns, and that money largely came from Ryan. Well, they've been having trouble selling these
guns, and Ryan owns a big stake in the company. The company is heavily in debt to Ryan,
so when he passes away in, I believe, 1929, his estate pretty much immediately
wants to liquidate their interest in the company, which
means selling the whole company. Now the other investors, the minority
investors in ... Auto Ordnance, were able to prevent this for about 10 years. And that's 10 years where they
managed to sell about 5,000 more guns. It's really selling quite slowly,
this is not a successful business. They've made a military gun, and they're
trying to sell it in a peacetime market. And ... they're getting a few, police are buying
some, individuals are buying a very small number. At any rate, by 1939 this comes to a head, and the Ryan estate is finally able
to force the sale of the company. And the guy who ... arranges to buy the
company is a guy by the name of Russell Maguire. And he is not popular with a
lot of the minority shareholders. A lot of the shareholders in this company are
people who are very much attached to the company, they've been in it from the very beginning,
and they think they see the potential in the gun, and the quality, and they don't want
to see the company destroyed. And Maguire has the reputation of being
what they'd call a corporate raider. Certainly the same sort of
person that still exists today. His modus operandi was to find failing companies,
buy them up, and then split up the company. And write off what debts could be written
off, sell whatever assets were available, squeeze all the remaining value out of the company,
and then walk away leaving it just an empty husk. And a lot of the shareholders didn't want
to see that happen to Auto Ordnance. And they were in luck, well sort
of, if you can consider it lucky, because it's 1939 and
World War Two is starting. And all of a sudden now there's starting to be some
significant demand for military submachine guns. And within just a couple of
months of acquiring the company Maguire would get a contract with Savage
to ... restart production of Thompsons. He actually tried to
get Colt to do this first, but Colt was busy with other
firearms manufacturing work, and they didn't want to take on the project. But, as part of the terms of the original
manufacturing contract with Colt, Auto Ordnance owned all of the
manufacturing tools that had been used, that had been developed
by Colt for the production. Those, at the end of that original production
run, became the property of Auto Ordnance. So when they got Savage to
agree to a production contract, they were able to provide Savage with ...
basically a complete set of production tooling, which allowed Savage to tool up and
start making the guns very quickly. And they signed a contract
in December of ... 1939, and by April of 1940 the first guns were
actually coming off the line and being delivered. So these first contracts would go one of
them to France for, I think, 3,750 Thompsons. France was of course very desperately
trying to put some of its own guns into production before Germany invaded,
before the war with Germany really heated up. And so they decided to spend some cash money
and buy some available guns from the US. Same thing basically
would be true for the British. Great Britain would order hundreds of
thousands of Thompson guns starting in 1940. And so there were some contracts for ...
guns going to Britain, and as this began the gun that they were producing was
basically identical to the 1928 pattern gun that, well, dated all the way back to 1928. It had the fancy Lyman rear
sight, it had a finned barrel, it had that vertical, fancy, distinctive looking
vertical front grip, it had a Cutts Compensator. Those are the sorts of guns that went
to Britain, and that went to France, and were available for commercial sale
early on, like before the US entered the war. But that would change, because as the war heated up, major,
huge, US military orders started coming in. And ... Auto Ordnance and Savage would have to make some compromises
to be able to keep up with production. So, we have two different patterns here, and there are a couple of different varieties
of what came to be designated the 1928A1. We're going to take a look at a bunch of those,
but I want to point out a couple of things first. Savage would do the bulk of the production
of these guns during World War Two. However, Auto Ordnance did reinvest
some of its profits back into the company, and they actually bought up
an old abandoned, or defunct, brake lining factory in
Bridgeport, Connecticut. And they turned it into a
production facility of their own. And Auto Ordnance started producing receivers
and trigger frames for their own Thompson gun. So this was the first time
since World War One that Auto Ordnance actually had
its own manufacturing facility. And they would produce about a quarter of the
guns made during World War Two themselves. So, they'd produce the receivers, they
subcontracted out most of the other parts, but then did the assembly themselves. So with these ... basically call them World
War Two production guns, the 28s and 28A1s, you'll find both Savage production guns
and Auto Ordnance production guns. So, with that in mind, let's go ahead
and take a closer look at these two, and go through what changes were
made over the course of this production. Let's start with markings ... although actually even
before that, let's take a look at the finish here. Because this is not the same high-gloss
blue finish that Colt put on the 1921 guns. Well, there was actually
a change in the standard of finish of the guns when
Savage took over production. And they now, instead of being blued,
they used a finish called Du-Lite, which, when it was applied to a
sandblasted surface like these receivers, it came out kind of a flat
grey like you see here. This one's got a little
bit of wear on it as well. So these don't have sort of
the lustre of the pre-war guns, and that makes sense, they're trying to
make them in much greater quantity now. So that aside, we have the
general nomenclature here. Thompson Submachine Gun, by the way it is
John Thompson himself who coined that name. "Submachine gun" was a creation of Auto
Ordnance and John Thompson as a way to describe this new handheld,
pistol calibre, well, submachine gun. It's a term that absolutely took hold,
and we still use it to this very day. Which also, by the way, explains why
it's not used in some European countries, where they prefer terms that basically translate
into "machine pistol", when translated literally. Anyway. Our designation here is they took a Model of [1928],
they added an "A1", and they added a "US". That "US" was actually added in 1941
because of the Lend-Lease Act. All guns that were being shipped out
for Lend-Lease, sent to other countries, were required to be marked "US". And so they added a US to the
designation ... for all of the Thompsons because the Lend-Lease guns were taken
out of the regular ordinary production line. Now, we also have a serial number here,
and you'll see this is number S-472230. This is the only way to determine
guns that were made by Savage, as opposed to guns that were made
in Bridgeport by Auto Ordnance. Savage was not allowed by the contract to
put their full name anywhere on the guns, so all they got was an
"S" prefix serial number. So this particular one is
a Savage production gun. As I said, they weren't allowed
to put their own name on it, the guns were all marked with Auto
Ordnance's name, as you see right here. And there's still some patent
information on the back of the receiver. For comparison's sake, here is
an Auto Ordnance production gun. Note that it is "A.O.", Auto Ordnance,
and serial number 150,000 and change. There are some changes
that were made to this, which I believe are the result
of police use after the war. ... It was 1928A1 over stamped "AC",
and an "X" added after the serial number, which, ... if I'm not completely incorrect,
indicates a sale to a police department. One thing I should point out that
I didn't mention earlier in this series, all of the guns are marked "A", so 21A, 28A. And the reason for this, ... originally they thought they were going to do
two different standards of the gun. A basic level which would be the "A" model, and a
superior model which would have been marked "S". Just for a fancier finish,
fancier wood, that sort of thing. Well, they never ended up producing the fancy
versions, they only made the standard guns, and thus they all ended up being "A" models. Then the "C" indicates whether or not the
gun was sold with a Cutts Compensator. So, that's why you'll have
21A, 21AC, 28A ... 28AC, and then the "28A1" is a
military designation instead. I should also point out we're not
going to take one of these apart because the internals are exactly
the same as the previous video, as the pre-war 1928 pattern guns. They have the same 600
round per minute rate of fire. If you'd like to see the internals, I would
recommend that you go ahead and take a look at the previous video in this sequence, so there
will be a link to that at the end of this one. Now the early 28A1s made for the US military
largely followed the standard 1928 pattern. These early ones had a Lyman rear sight
(this is a pre-war 28 here with a nice blued finish), but the early 28A1s maintained this Lyman sight. What they did was replace the front grip,
and we'll touch on that in a moment. About midway through production
they started changing features over to make the guns cheaper and
simpler, and faster and easier to make. And one of the big changes they made was the
adoption of this basically L-bracket style of sight. That was adopted in December of 1941.
It has a big aperture here for 100 yards, and it has a little tiny, almost unusable,
notch on the top for 250 yards. And that replaced this sight
that was adjustable out to 500. Surprisingly, the Cutts Compensator actually
stayed on the A1 for a remarkable amount of time. In fact I believe all of the Auto
Ordnance guns maintained it, and Savage kept it on
there for a while as well. As for the front grip, ... for the US military guns
almost all of them replaced this vertical grip with a much simpler
horizontal grip, like you see here. Now the British and French contract guns
had the vertical grip, as did early commercials. But almost all the [US] military ones
will have that horizontal grip. One of the other changes made early on
was to replace this milled ejector plate. That goes through into the action,
and holds the ejector right there. They replaced that milled one with a simpler
to produce stamped version of the same thing. So that's three separate parts
stamped and riveted together. And that ... started use with
the early US military 28A1s. And lastly, by the late segment of
production the barrel fins were removed. Basically it was deemed suitable
that the gun was open bolt, that gave it enough cooling capacity. The extra cooling that you would get from
the fins on the barrel was really unnecessary, and not worth the expense,
so they were deleted. And we ended up with smooth barrels on
the guns late in production of the 28A1. You'll note that this particular one also
no longer has a Cutts Compensator. In addition, the control levers changed slightly. So on this very nice pre-war gun, you'll
notice that the control levers have nice checkering on them
to give you a better grip. Well, as production continued
that would go away, and the late production 28A1s
have these smooth levers instead. One last element you will see
on a lot, if not most, 28A1s is this big reinforcing bolt through the
stock, which was not there previously. However, this wasn't actually done
during production of the guns. This was a military retrofit that was
adopted after production had ended, and they went back and added the bolt
to most of the 28A1s, but not all of them. And you might have noticed that one of our
28A1 examples had a 30 round magazine in it. Well, that is because one day before
Pearl Harbour, on December 6th 1941, the US military formally
adopted the 30 round magazine. This was found to be a good way to
obviously increase the magazine capacity, 20 rounds was a little short. The Army experimented with 30s, they also
experimented with coupled 20 round magazines, where you had one upright, and then
one flipped around on the side like this. They found that that was
more likely to cause problems when you went prone and stuffed
your spare magazine in the dirt. And so they ended up adopting
a 30 round magazine pattern. This would go on to be the dominant
magazine type used during World War Two. These 28A1s are still capable of using drum
magazines, and they were supplied with them. Especially if you look at pictures
of the British use of the Thompson, you'll see that they often had drums. But the drums are bulky,
they're very heavy, they rattle, and in combat these 30 round stick mags
were found to be the best compromise between handling and
ammunition capacity. So these guns started
out being sold at the same really astronomical prices as the
pre-war guns, like $200 apiece. In fact at the beginning of World War Two,
the US Army was paying $202.50 for a gun. Actually more than
the commercial retail price because the Army had some specifications for
packing and greasing, and that costs a little extra. Or at least Auto Ordnance was able
to tack on a little extra to cover it. However, by 1942, when
production of the 28A1 ended, the government price had
dropped all the way down to $70. Now that's still way more than the cost of
the models that would replace the 28A1, and that's of course the primary
reason that it was replaced. And we'll get into its replacement in the
next ... episode of this series coming up. But, to ... stay on the A1 for a minute. In total
between call it ... early 1940 and late 1942, over the production span of this gun, just
over a million of these were manufactured. So Auto Ordnance went from taking
basically 20 years to sell 15,000 guns, to making and selling a million of
them over the course of 2.5 years. So a complete turnaround in
the fortunes of the company because there was a giant war, and that
drove a massive amount of demand for a submachine gun that
may not have been the best. This is still basically a
World War One pattern gun. But it's the gun that was available, that
was tooled up and ready to produce. And that's worth more than a better design that still has to actually be
figured out and put into production. So this would be the first huge batch of
Thompson submachine guns manufactured. And it wouldn't be the last, because
after this the Army is going to adopt a new pattern that they're going to
designate the M1 submachine gun. So, as I said, we'll get to that one tomorrow. And in the meantime, thank you
very much for watching. If you are interested in getting yourself a registered,
full-auto, legal, Thompson submachine gun, take a look at the link in
the description text below. ... That will take you to ForgottenWeapons.com,
from whence you can follow links to the catalogue pages here at Morphy's
for either of these two guns. You can also search their catalogue
for all of the other Thompson guns that they have in their upcoming fall Firearms
Auction, because they've got a bunch of them. So, I think that'll hold us until next time. Thanks for watching.
Does it HAVE to be in the game? I mean, ive seen mosin's used in the middle east, he'll I think I remembered a syrian dude with a ppsh41 a few years back. But nowhere since atleast the Korean war (maybe early vietnam before stoner and the whole ar/xm program) have I seen the m1928 seen in action. Hell even the german MP-40 has been seen during the syrian civil war aswell as around 5000 STG-44s, but no tommies.
Theres better candidates than the tommy gun to fit thematically. AK variants/copies, MAS-36s, RPD, RPK,
More WW2 weapons...
Yaaawwwwn.